...usually are left.

The best candidate is almost certainly H. G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds — but not the novel itself.

The single biggest one-day market shock caused by speculative fiction came from the 1938 radio adaptation by Orson Welles broadcast on CBS.

On 30 October 1938, Welles presented the story as fake breaking news about a Martian invasion. Many listeners tuned in late and missed the disclaimer. Panic followed: people fled homes, jammed phone lines, and some businesses shut early.

Financial effect? Not a crash, but measurable disruption.

Newspapers and later economic analyses reported:

  trading desks received waves of calls asking if New York was under attack
  some investors attempted emergency sell orders
  retail activity briefly froze in parts of the Northeast
  next-day market commentary explicitly mentioned “radio panic”

The Dow Jones Industrial Average did not collapse, but historians consider it the clearest case where fiction directly interfered with real market behavior within hours.

Why this one stands out:

Science fiction normally influences markets slowly, by shaping expectations (AI, space travel, cyberpunk tech, etc.). The Welles broadcast instead created an instant perceived reality shock.

A strong runner-up, though less direct, is Neuromancer by William Gibson. It didn’t move markets in a day, but it helped inspire the cybersecurity and internet economy that later drove enormous tech valuations.

So the answer depends on definition:

Immediate, single-day behavioral impact War of the Worlds broadcast (1938).
Largest long-term capital impact inspired by fiction cyberpunk and AI literature reshaping entire sectors.

Speculative fiction rarely moves markets because it predicts the future. It moves them when people briefly believe the future has already arrived.

It would be a shame if something happened to it.

"how the billions of dollars are to be spent (every member nation has 1 year to ante up $1B)."

The UK couldn't build HALF a high speed railway for over £100 billions.

How would they build desalination plants, hospitals, ALL the sewage, electricity, drinking water infrastructure etc etc, for the puny sums they have planned?
It's not even enough to remove the rubble.

And that's even before putting up a brick for a single hospital or school.

...making NPCs smarter than their current room-temperature IQ, so that you can have actual conversations with them and don't have to find out what keyword you have to use to actually get the information you seek?

In calendar year 2025, there were 315 farm bankruptcy filings under Chapter 12 (the farm bankruptcy code), up about 46 % from 2024. That number is one of the highest in recent years (though still below the peaks of the 1980s and early 2010s).
I let you guess why.

The total number of U.S. farms fell by about 15 000 in 2025, bringing the national total to roughly 1.865 million farms. That drop is partly due to closures, consolidations, and exits from farming.

"This could be the case in the US, too. It has huge, sunny, sparsely populated areas. Some of them are pretty dry and no one really wants to farm there either."

The word you're looking for is 'deserts'.

Imagine a big box of numbered balls. Someone secretly chooses half of them, that’s set S. You are only allowed to pull balls from S. Your job is to give back one ball that is NOT in S.

Classical world: every time you pull a ball, you just see one number. If the box is big, you have to pull a lot of balls before you’re confident which numbers are missing. Basically, you keep a list of what you’ve seen and guess something not on the list. You might need tons of samples.

Quantum world: instead of one ball at a time, you get a magic “wave ball” that contains all of S at once, like all its numbers are smeared together in a superposition. With some clever quantum tricks, you can flip that wave so it now represents “everything that is not S.” Then you measure it and boom, you get a number from outside S.

So the shocker is this: one quantum sample versus lots and lots of classical samples.

They also argue this isn’t just a weird edge case. Under normal crypto assumptions, classical computers really can’t fake this efficiently.

Important detail: if you convert the quantum thing into ordinary classical samples first, the magic disappears. The power comes from keeping the “wave” intact.

So the paper is basically saying, look, quantum computers are not just faster calculators, they sometimes need far less data to do a job. That’s the whole punchline.

That is if there's not too much dirt on the boots.

...that he has now a very clean house.

Kids didn’t suddenly read Kant. They migrated.

Typical substitutions:

YouTube in the browser
Mobile web versions of TikTok/Instagram
Discord via browser
online games
group chats
streaming sites
short-video aggregators

In other words: the behavior remained even when the app disappeared.

Or update daily Aspirin to 1000mg.

Fair. Here is the actually concise version.

Major HSBC scandals:

2012 — Money laundering & sanctions violations
Helped launder cartel money and processed transactions for Iran, Cuba, Sudan.
Fine: $1.9 billion.

2015 — Swiss Leaks tax evasion scandal
Swiss private bank helped wealthy clients hide assets offshore.

2019 — U.S. tax evasion case
Assisted Americans hiding assets in Swiss accounts.
Fine: ~$192 million.

2020 — FinCEN Files
Revealed HSBC moved large suspicious funds even after the 2012 settlement.

2021 — UK anti-money-laundering failures
Fine: £63.9 million.

Interest-rate manipulation (Euribor cartel)
Participation in benchmark-rate rigging.
EU fine ~€31 million.

UK government bond trader cartel
Illegal information sharing between traders.
Part of ~£105 million industry fines.

Deposit protection failures (UK)
Failed to correctly safeguard customer deposits.
Fine: £57 million.

Hong Kong disclosure breach (2025)
Failed to disclose conflicts in research reports.
Fine: ~$4 million.

Core pattern (one line):
Money laundering, tax evasion facilitation, sanctions breaches, market manipulation, weak compliance controls.

That’s the short list.

Everybody who got a gunshot wound has time to wait until 9PM until then next shift starts.

Finally not longer risking prison to get a decent meal.